Kyte: is kyte still a startup? Nokia are using Kyte as an internal video tool.

Amazee: social collaboration platform

Cassiber: idea management software, ranking ideas and feedback

shiftTHINK: social network data analysis

Zemanta: blog assistant, context recommendations when blogging

Headshift: (when did Headshift become a startup? I love you guys, but you’ve been around too long to be called that, imho.)

Nimbuzz: aggregating VoiP, IM, chat, presence

Winkwaves (via skype):

Mediaclipping (via skype):

steph-note: no offense, but after Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, I think I’m sick of hearing about startups. We seem to be going over and over and over the same things again. Of course each one has a unique twist and looks cool, but there are so many of them and none really stand out or jump at me in a “oh my god this is what the world needs” way.

*Here are my live notes of this [Future of Web Apps (FOWA)](http://www.futureofwebapps.com/) session. They are probably incomplete and may contain mistakes, though I do my best to be accurate. Chances are I’ll be adding links to extra material and photos later on, so don’t hesitate to come back and check.*

Dick: a bunch of startups, last one successful (FeedBurner), so now people think he knows what he’s talking about. 😉

We hear a lot about how cheap it is to start a company now. Lessons learned that are somewhat counter-intuitive to what is usually thought in this industry.

It’s true that you can get a company started without much money, but it still costs a lot to scale.

Cofounders: unequal equals. Better to treat all cofounders as equal. Unequal brings problems (“yeah, sure you want to do that, you have 75%”).

Dick and cofounders never build business plans anymore. Business plans are things that people write to try to make things they want happen the way they want them to happen. Dick doesn’t think investors read them anyway.

Disagrees with trying to evaluate the size of the market. You can’t know. e.g. eBay.

Location: FeedBurner, everybody in Chicago. Believes there is no strategic benefit in locating a company in the Silicon Valley. Actually, better to be away, you’re distant from the echo chamber. Self-perpetuating myth. Benefit in buzz in being in the Silicon Valley, but do you really need buzz to be successful? For Dick, no benefit in the long-term success of the business.

Cash. You always need way more cash than what you think that you’re going to need. Estimate, then multiply by 2.5, and it was even a bit tight. The leading cause of companies going out of business is running out of money. So raise as much as you can. Don’t run out of business.

VC funding is great. Find the right investors. Raise money when you don’t need it. You can get better terms for venture investors. When you start raising a few millions from VCs, you’ll start seeing legal/jargon VC terms (preference, multiples, participation). They’ll tell you they’re standard deals, but there is no such thing. So learn to understand those terms. (e.g. on Dick’s blog, and other places).

It’s better to own a smaller piece of a bigger pie than the opposite. Everybody needs to be happy about what’s going on. Everybody employed needs the same *kind* of deal (options, equity etc.), keeps goals aligned, and everyone is treated the same way. Even if it’s the “only way I could get that guy”.

Hiring. Take the guy who runs the fastest and then figure out where to put him. Don’t go out to hire a VP of sales. Look for people who are best available athlete, well-rounded person for this kind of role, but able to zig if necessary. *steph-note: …any startups looking to hire? ;-)* Dick prefers flat organisations. Hierarchy begets bureaucracy. Problem with flat organisations: when there are under-performers. Replace hierarchy with tools. Deal with this by having employees come up with their own KPIs (measurable!)

Growing the team: mistake = hiring sales and marketing too soon. Once you start selling and marketing, things need to be cooked and ready to go. Without that, you can iterate rapidly. Speed of execution is a competitive advantage of small companies over big ones. Wait until you’re ready to go to market.

**Product development and business strategy (1-4 years)**

Visit to the eye doctor. Iterate on everything. Disagrees with “get a crappy version out there”, because then you have to iterate with that version that is out there.

Day 1: feed stats, but knew they wanted to do more later. They waited until they had a basic underlying architecture to be able to extend the service before they launched. It didn’t do much, but was ready for building more. So that allowed them to iterate very rapidly. “How are you guys rolling out features every month?!” Spent the first 5 months building that underlying architecture for extensibility.

Let the market tell you what the business model is (cf. Twitter). Open system with APIs, help the market tell you what the business model is. Lock-in is bad for business. APIs lower the barrier to entry and to third-party service development. Lock-in creates barriers to entry. *steph-note: so does the fact you don’t own your data*.

Revenue plan: don’t kid yourself. Goes along with “don’t run out of money”. You’ll never make as much money as you plan, or as fast. VCs don’t pay much attention to it. Those plans are always wrong and at least a year late.

Don’t spend months and months trying to get your pricing right.

Strong advice: **don’t worry about your exit strategy, worry about everything else**, and also **be competitive on your merits, not on how much the other guys suck**.

Let your company have a voice and a culture. It’s harder to make your language sound antiseptic.

*Here are my live notes of this [Future of Web Apps (FOWA)](http://www.futureofwebapps.com/) session. They are probably incomplete and may contain mistakes, though I do my best to be accurate. Check out [Paul’s essay derived from this keynote](http://paulgraham.com/webstartups.html). The [conversation also continues on the YCombinator news site](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62982).*

*steph-note: missed the beginning, very incomplete*

Standardizing things, from funding to acquisitions. Acquisitions are interesting because the buying company knows exactly what “brain power” they are acquiring.

Instead of approaching venture capitalists with a plan, start the company with a few thousands of $$ from your uncle or [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/), and then approach VCs with a company. *steph-note: I thought this was the obvious thing to do*

We still need startup hubs. You need to make a startup succeed, not just start. Here is the value of startup hubs: face to face meetings. No technology in the world replaces that. Whether you need it is not the question: the important thing is “does it offer an advantage or not”? If it does, then your competitors will have it over you if you don’t do it.

The ability to be able to work face-to-face for three months greatly outweighs the disadvantage of moving.

Seed funding is a national business, contrary to VC funding which is regional. No regional Y Combinator branches. Just like you can’t have a regional “big university”. But maybe seed funding is actually international?

If seed funding is indeed international, then not really possible to create other “Silicon Valleys”, because the people who are really motivated to succeed will move to SV, and those left behind are “less good”.

Acquirers are assholes, even the nicest companies (lawyers, “they’ll make you pay”). Need: Chief Acquisition Officers. Would both identify the opportunity and close the deal. Now it’s two separate steps. Maybe in future, big companies will have both a VP of Technology (in-house) and a CAO (bring good stuff in).

College may change, if hackers start building startups. For the moment it’s warped towards preparing you to have an employer. There’s nothing magical about a degree. Do you need a degree if you’re going to start your own company? The need for degrees is driven entirely by administrative requirements.

Don’t encourage people to start companies in college, though, because that gives them a great excuse to abandon their startup. OTOH, some of their best founders were still in school.

The greatest value of university is not the brand name or maybe the classes, but the other people you meet there. *steph-note: not sure this is valid outside the US.* Shift from getting good grades to impress employers to actually learning stuff because you’ll need it. *steph-note: OMG, is US education that broken?!*

Increasing the number of startups would mean you can’t sit on an idea if you have a good idea, because other people have your idea. So if it gets easier to start startups, then they are more likely to actually do it.

If people actually get to work instead of sitting on ideas, technology will evolve faster. Some ideas are too scary! Look at how hard a time Microsoft is having trying to figure out web apps. New ideas implemented increasingly in startups rather than big companies. Big companies are just not a good place to make things happen fast.

Talked with a guy who had his startup recently acquired by a big company. From a “lines of code cranked out”, they were 1/13th as productive after the acquisition. Something about big companies that just sucks the energy out of you.

Y Combinator: there to release energy by making it more easy for hackers to start their startups.

For the moment, the process of starting a company is a whole series of tubes 😉 — lots of kinks in the plumbing.

In future: a big straight pipe. Being measured by performance, fleshing out the arbitrary crap people are measured by nowadays.

Paul talked about exit strategies, not running a company to make money. Startup means exit. If there is no exit, there is not startup. Not all technology companies are startups. Not all new companies are startups.

Hackers actually like to make stuff, they’re not in there for the money. So actually, if you let them make stuff, you can pay them less! Big companies are paranoïd about their brand, they should be less scared about releasing stuff. Companies are judged by their successes, not the crap stuff they might have released (look at Google). Just let developers release stuff to the world.

What can we do to encourage startups? (Question from Ian Forrester, BBC).
A: Make documentaries on people doing startups. Seeing how it goes is usually what convinces people to take the plunge.

If you just want a couple thousand $, don’t raise VC money, just get angel money. What makes Silicon Valley is the angels. Google would have never made it if they hadn’t had angel money.

Y Combinator is going to open source their angel money paperwork, to make it easier for “rich hackers” to invest.

*Here are my live notes of [Ted Rheingold](http://dogster.com/)’s [Future of Web Apps (FOWA)](http://www.futureofwebapps.com/) session. They are probably incomplete and may contain mistakes, though I do my best to be accurate. [Suw also blogged this session.](http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/10/03/fowa07b_ted_rheingold.php)*

*Blogged Ted earlier this year at Reboot when he was encouraging us to [learn about cats and dogs](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/05/31/reboot9-ted-rheingold-learning-from-dogs-and-cats/).*

Simple idea: let people make web pages for their dogs and cats. Realised later that this could actually be a business.

What does it take to be a business? Suddenly all sorts of words like CTO, CEO, Incorporating, Titles… start flying around.

But mainly, being a business is about **generating revenue**, or at least having a pretty good idea where it’s going to come from. If you don’t have an idea how you’re going to make money, you’re going to run out of money.

Important: don’t think there is a new economy. There’s new technology, but **the economy hasn’t really changed**.

Dogster and Catster make money from advertising, partnerships, people subscribing… A lot like a magazine. Virtual gifts. You’re maybe disrupting the economy, but not creating a whole new one.

**Learn your market.** It took Ted a long time to learn these markets. You can’t pretend to know where the advertising goes because you’ve read magazines. Also, get ready to learn other markets. Ted thought at some point they were going to do classifieds, spent a lot of time trying to figure it out, but nobody was interested in their classifieds, so that failed. Don’t get overly attached.

**Get advisers.** People who understand the industry you’re in. But also people who understand how to run a business.

**Learn business finance.** Know how much money you need to spend, etc. Forecasting expenses, revenues. Some of these things are actually pretty basic, but you need to be comfortable with them. Don’t spend any money you don’t have to. If you’re cheap with your employees and your contractors, they may leave (*steph-note: indeed!*), if you’re cheap with your hosting your site might go down, if you don’t trademark your logo/names…

**Sell, sell, sell.** Ted is a designer, not a salesperson. Nobody is going to sell your business for me. Everything changed for Ted when he brought in a business partner. (Not an employee!) Important to choose well. It will be years of partnering with that person, startups don’t usually get bought. You need somebody who is as passionate as you are.

**Make your business a business.**

Very hard to make money on AdSense or that kind of advertising unless you’re serving millions and millions of pages. Sponsors and partnerships are more viable. Even a small market is interesting if it’s targeted. Subscription: emotional thing. Be part of the team. To show their support.

*steph-note: lost some of the Q&A because of running around with the microphone.*

Fail fast. They just removed classifieds three months ago. Important to see if the changes you’re thinking about are really worth it financially.

Q: when did you decide it could be a viable business?

A: thought it would be a kind of passive business where he’d get a check every month from advertising for a bit of maintenance here and there. Month 3, 10’000 people joined the site. A lot! Way more than he thought. Used the wisdom of his crowds to think about it, and then sat on it for a while before making the big decision. Making sure people are using it and spending as little money as possible the whole time.

Hiring is a real pain, specially if you want to be ethical about it (don’t want to hire somebody and lay him off three months later).